MRE Christmas
by Totenkinder Madchen
Summary: It's Christmas in a campsite for six members of G.I. Joe. There's no holly and not much jolly, but there's comparative religion, cursed candy, Cthulhu, and the dreaded Ham Slice with Rice. Humor and friendship 'fic, complete. Not actually crack.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:** Yes, this story contains a discussion of religion by G.I. Joe characters. Please don't run away; I promise I didn't make it too serious.

I felt moved to do some kind of Christmas piece, because (if nothing else) I was planning to do Halloween and Thanksgiving pieces and never finished either. Oddly enough, though, we don't know much about the Joes' backgrounds beyond the essentials, and I thought we could get some Christmasy humor out of it by having them touch on the subject of religion. Don't worry, nobody starts in with any screeds or bashes anybody—this is labeled as humor, isn't it?

The scene was initially inspired by my eldest brother (ex-USMC, ex-Army) and his rhapsodizing about the horrors of various MREs. All of the meal information cited, including the superstition connected to one item and the inedibility of others, is true. (My brother was given the ham slice with rice during the Crucible, the final intensive training of the USMC boot camp, and he literally starved rather than eat it.)

All of the religious information cited here is also correct, to the best of my knowledge. No disrespect is meant to the practitioners of any of these faiths; I'm a Roman Catholic who went to a Jewish school and studied Zen, and I really don't have any grudges against any particular religion. It's all for the purposes of good humor.

EDIT: Thanks to Zeistrijder for correcting the information about the terminology of the LDS church.

**Rating:** K+, except for one bad word

**Disclaimer:** G.I. Joe and all associated characters and concepts are property of Hasbro Inc, and I derive no profit from this. Please accept this in the spirit with which it is offered—as a work of respect and love, not an attempt to claim ownership or earn money from this intellectual property.

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**MRE Christmas**

_by Totenkinder Madchen_

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In a world that contains things like Cobra Commander and the Dreadnoks, the men and women of the armed forces can't always stop for the holidays. However, even the identity-classified, secretly-headquartered, the-only-thing-you'll-get-out-of-me-is-name-rank-and-serial-number members of G.I. Joe weren't above wanting to visit family and friends for the more important holidays, and if they could be spared, General Hawk was usually sympathetic about letting them have a bit of leave. The troops under his command were the best, and if they weren't likely to be needed, there was no point in having them champing at the bit and hanging around base.

Even so, a skeleton force would have to remain at all times. Cobra Commander had a depressingly Batman-villain-like tendency to cook up insane plots at exactly the most inopportune times, and seemed to get even more amusement out of a plan when he was spoiling a major holiday for a large number of people _and _planning to subjugate them to his will. He has in past years managed to ruin two Christmases, three Thanksgivings, two Valentines' Days, a New Years', an Arbor Day (though that was probably a coincidence), and of course, Halloween. The latest year was no different. And so it came to pass that at twenty minutes to midnight on December 24th, a small contingent of Joes found themselves encamped in a scrubby corner of the Sudan with a few tents, a stack of MREs, and strict orders not to leave the region until they were certain that the "R.A.B.O.C. Organization for the People" was, in fact, just a local political party with an unfortunate acronym.

Needless to say, many of the soldiers were in a less than festive mood. Two—Scarlett and Flint—had literally been pulled off the transports headed out, and even Snake-Eyes and Dusty (one of whom had no family to speak of and the other of whom just didn't spend much time with his) had been looking forward to the holiday meal that Roadblock always put together. Low-Light, as usual, was impossible to read: he had just spent some time scouting, found a place where he could set up under cover at a moment's notice, judged he wasn't needed immediately and proceeded to go to sleep. The team's ground capacity was rounded out by Footloose, who was apparently having issues with his Zen state of mind after being confronted with a Christmas dinner of MREs.

"I'll swap you," he said hopelessly to Dusty. "C'mon, I can't eat this stuff. Trade?" He proffered the tan plastic package containing the notorious 'four fingers of death,' or, as they were known to the Army, the Assorted Beef Frankfurter Meal-Ready-to-Eat. Dusty, who had correctly guessed what number Low-Light was thinking of and therefore won first choice of meal, glanced silently back and forth between the deadly Four Fingers and his own dinner, which contained a fairly edible piece of chicken.

The desert trooper had (by virtue of his desert survival training) learned to eat virtually anything, and everybody present knew that he was one of the only people capable of choking down anything the MREs could throw at him. They also knew that everybody else knew this, and that Dusty would be able to extract a fairly hefty bribe from Footloose in exchange for trading meals with him. Footloose waited hopelessly, wondering exactly what he would have to do in order to balance his karma and prevent himself from spending Christmas morning with the notorious frankfurter cramps.

But after a long, pregnant silence, Dusty just shrugged and grinned. "Yeah, sure," he said, and tossed his MRE to Footloose, who was so surprised that he fumbled the catch and almost spilled some of the meal's precious ration of Skittles all over the dirt. He managed it in the end, though, and kicked the frankfurter packet over to Dusty before the desert trooper could change his mind.

"Merry Christmas," Dusty added as an afterthought.

"Season's greetings," Footloose replied, tearing gratefully into the chicken patty.

Somebody poked Dusty in the shoulder. Turning, he saw Snake-Eyes, implacable as ever in black and bristling with weapons. The ninja held up his own ration—the dreaded Ham Slice with Rice. Next to the ham slice, even the frankfurters were appetizing. [Happy New Year?] he signed hopefully.

Dusty grinned again, but was momentarily stumped for an appropriate response. "'Why is this night different from all other nights?'" he said finally, swapping franks for ham.

That got a soft snort from Scarlett. "That's Passover," she said, calmly biting into her own (decently palatable) BBQ Pork ration. "Wrong season."

"No point in being insensitive, right? We're a caring, Eighties kind of army now," Dusty retorted good-humoredly as he tore open the packet of what was allegedly ham. "What, do you have something against Jewish people?"

"Last time I checked, Judaism had a winter holiday," Flint butted in. Their camp had been pitched in a small hollow, and their immediate superior was perched a few yards up the slope, examining a map. "You may have heard of it?"

"Maybe," Dusty responded, blasé as ever. "I don't pay much attention to gentile stuff."

That got another, louder snort, this time from Snake-Eyes. The ninja had retreated into the shadows and peeled up the lower half of his mask to eat, but he was the only Joe present who could still talk with his mouth full. One hand signed in the gloom. [That word doesn't mean what you think it means.]

"You're Mormon?" Scarlett said curiously. She had never really considered the religion of her teammates, beyond a few obvious examples (Storm Shadow claimed to follow no gods. The Shinto items in his quarters said otherwise), but when she thought about it it made some kind of sense. Dusty, after all, had grown up in Sin City but seemed largely disgusted by the things most people found entrancing about it. And it would explain the 'gentile' remark: in the late 1800s, the LDS had a tradition of referring to all non-LDSers as gentiles, much to the amusement of some Jews she knew. However, the desert trooper just shook his head.

"Some of my family were, and there's a few still left in Mesquite. Actually, I think I'm agnostic."

"You _think_?" Scarlett responded, amused. "Agnosticism is the view that claims about the existence of any god are unknowable or unverifiable. So . . . you're not sure if you're not sure?"

"That's practically Zen," Footloose put in, now in a considerably better mood that he had eaten something closely resembling real food.

Flint slid down the slope, folding up the map as he did so. "Footloose, you wouldn't know real Zen if Siddhartha Gautama himself descended on a meteor and brained you with it."

"Flint," Footloose said with a note of pity in his voice, "you're going to have to go through ten reincarnations just to get your aura in tune with the rest of humanity. I'm not worrying about what you think."

"'Caring, Eighties army,' Flint," Dusty reminded their ad hoc leader mildly, tearing the last piece of rice-studded ham slice in two. "That includes respecting everybody's belief system, no matter how much bong water they've been drinking."

That at least got a bit of a grin out of Flint, which was a relief for everyone. Scarlett had been going home to visit her rowdy and numerous extended family, but Flint had been planning a private Christmas in Hawaii with Lady Jaye, only to get dragged out on mission at the last minute. A tense and snappy mission leader made everybody equally tense. Now, the atmosphere relaxed just a little as Flint pulled up a rock and planted himself on it with his own MRE.

A moment later, Low-Light came to join them. "Your shift," he said to Footloose, who nodded and wolfed down the last of his "food" before hotfooting it up the slope. The sniper nibbled on a packet of peanut butter crackers and drank a lot of water, apparently completely unfazed by spending Christmas Eve in the Sudan, but he raised an eyebrow when Flint tore open his meal's package.

"Not gonna eat those, are you?" he said, pointing to a small colorful packet which had fallen out of the MRE.

Flint retrieved the packet, which contained a small selection of Charms hard candies. "You're kidding, 'Light. Don't tell me you pay attention to that superstition? Serious soldiers don't believe in curses."

[You'd be surprised,] Snake-Eyes signed as he rejoined the group, pulling his mask down over his face. [I once saw a guy get tossed out of a Humvee for eating Charms while he was supposed to be on watch. People say they're bad luck.]

That got him a critical eyeballing from Flint. "You too? It's ridiculous. This isn't a Saturday morning cartoon."

Scarlett coughed delicately. "You _are _talking to a ninja."

"The point is," Flint said, deliberately tearing open the packet, "I would've bought all this from Footloose. Or Rock'n'Roll, maybe. If he'd been to Burning Man recently. But a candy curse doesn't strike me as the kind of thing sane Joes should believe in."

[Belief is where you find it.] Snake-Eyes shrugged. [There are all kinds of religions out there, and some of them have pretty ridiculous-sounding beliefs.]

"Aha," Dusty said, brightening up. "Another agnostic!"

Snake-Eyes' shrug was eloquent in and of itself.

"Unless we're talking to my family," Scarlett put in. "Then he's Lutheran."

Flint had unfortunately taken that moment to drink a mouthful of water, and his snort of laughter turned into a muffled glubbing noise. "I can imagine that," he managed to snicker, mopping his streaming nose and eyes. "Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door with a shuriken. No wonder the Catholics were never able to have him killed."

"It would've made an unusual Protestant Reformation, that's for sure," Scarlett said thoughtfully. "'When we say we want you to stop doing this stuff, we really, _really_ mean it.' Slice. Modern sermons would be much more interesting."

There was a moment of silence as five members of G.I. Joe contemplated a world run by the Church of the Ninja.

"I don't like it," Dusty said finally. "I think it would make Beach Head angry."

"How would he know?" Flint pointed out. "If history was changed, he'd never know about it, and he would have been raised in that tradition. Beach is Christian, isn't he? Baptist?"

"I would've bet on voodoo, myself. Something where they sacrifice chickens and make dolls of people they don't like."

"That would explain why he's always trying to kill us on the PT course," Scarlett said thoughtfully, nodding to Dusty. "A blood offering to appease his dark masters. Ai, ai, Beach Head fhtagn."

Snake-Eyes leveled an accusing finger at her. [I _knew_ you owned those Lovecraft books I found under your bed. 'Belongs to Cover Girl,' my ass.]

"Guys," Low-Light broke in. As usual, he never talked much, so him volunteering to speak of his own free will was a surprise. He glanced up at the sky, which was beautifully clear and velvety purple-black, spangled with stars. The moon was nowhere to be seen. "Merry Christmas."

The four other Joes in the circle fell silent again, following his gaze upwards. Though there was no moon, there was also no ambient light from crowded cities to disturb the darkness, and the great wash of the Milky Way tinted the sky silvery high above them. There was no Pole Star in this part of the world, but the stars of Taurus and the pale gleam of the Pleiades shone pure and clear. They were far from home, but the world around them was cool and quiet, the constellations of summer an unexpectedly welcome sight when their own country was ploughing through yet another snowy winter. There were no footsteps or approaching enemies, and if they were lucky, nor would they be. Everybody had gotten something vaguely edible.

"Works for me," Dusty said.


	2. Epilogue

**Author's note:** This is technically a separate thing, but I decided to post it as a semi-unconnected epilogue to the previous story, because it follows the same idea of GI Joe logic + comparative theology and superstition = WTF.

Kind of inspired by "Ask a Ninja," but only in that it touches on a similar subject.

**Rating:** K

**Warning! **Contains future kids (invented by CrystalOfEllinon), fluff, and frustrated Kamakura. Author not responsible for diabetes induced while reading 'fic.

**Disclaimer:** G.I. Joe and all associated characters and concepts are property of Hasbro Inc, and I derive no profit from this. Please accept this in the spirit with which it is offered—as a work of respect and love, not an attempt to claim ownership or earn money from this intellectual property.

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**Santanic Rituals**

_by Totenkinder Madchen_

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_Ten years later and several thousand miles away . . . _

It's always difficult to persuade children to go to sleep on Christmas Eve. Twins, even moreso: when you've got your eye on one, the other can make a break for it. Redheaded, devious, six-year-old twins, currently being raised in the ninja tradition by Clan Arashikage? Forget about it.

"I said, go to sleep," Kamakura said for what felt like the billionth time. Normally, when he wanted to subdue someone, a quick nerve pinch or a carefully-applied fist to the side of the head would do the trick, but he had no intention of being murdered by his sensei. Snake-Eyes had trusted Kamakura to watch the twins while he took Mistress Shana out to look for one of Timber's missing pups, and that included putting them to bed with minimal violence. Plus, Kamakura had the sneaking suspicion that Sean and Terri would be impossible for him to subdue: despite being trained by one of the deadliest ninjas in the world, he had yet to learn a defense against large, watery, puppy-dog eyes.

Sean, two minutes younger and only mildly less of a nightmare than his twin sister, burrowed down under his comforter and peered out at Kamakura. The boy was terminally messy and had created a nest of comic books, toys, discarded socks, blankets, and drawing paper, giving his babysitter the distinct impression of being stared at by a small, feral animal looking out of its den. "Kam, is Santa gonna be here?"

The ninja puffed out a breath under his mask. "Sean, you know Santa isn't real."

That was something both sensei and Mistress Shana had agreed on. Stories were nice, but after years of running secret missions that would be handwaved or flat-out denied by the governments of the world, they were determined to actually get the credit for their effort for once. [And frankly, I don't want my children growing up thinking that a stranger dropping down the chimney while they're asleep is nothing to be worried about,] Snake-Eyes had signed. Nevertheless, Sean and Terri had both picked up the story from television, and were now determined to stay up and meet the fat jolly man who would apparently be bringing Sean the ghillie suit he was dying to have.

"Says you," Terri butted in, reluctantly climbing into her own bed and pulling the covers up to her chin. "Uncle Tommy says some people think ninjas aren't real either."

Kamakura barely restrained the urge to eyeroll. Terri would notice and inevitably report him to sensei. "Ninjas are very different from Santa, Terri."

"Why?" Terri demanded.

"Because ninjas are highly-trained, skilled warriors, and Santa Claus is a story invented to make kids be good so they can have presents." A note of irritation crept into Kamakura's voice, making him wince ever so slightly: after his biological father had joined Cobra, becoming just another Fred Broca, the holidays had often involved protests against bourgeois materialism and "Cobra Claus" indoctrination videos. Wade Collins had changed all that, but still . . . Issues? Who, him?

Terri wasn't having any of it. "People say ninjas are stories too," she pointed out, sticking out her lower lip ever so slightly.

"Yeah," Sean chimed in. "Maybe Santa's a ninja."

" . . . Santa Claus is not a ninja."

"Why not?" Sean said. "Nobody ever sees him, right? And he's really fast."

"And he can do stuff normal people can't." The idea seemed to have caught Terri's interest too. "Da and Ma can get outta cuffs by doing that-" She wriggled her fingers, unable to find exactly the right words for 'dislocating the bones of the hand and wrist'-"thingy, and Uncle Tommy can do it with his shoulders too. Maybe that's how he gets down the chimneys."

Kamakura scoffed at that. "Please. No ninja would be that bad at stealth. He wears bright red!"

"Uncle Tommy wears white," Sean pointed out cheerfully, with the damning instinct for trouble that all six-year-olds possess. "And YOU wear green."

Dammit. Kamakura had walked right into that. "It's impossible," he said calmly, albeit with some effort. "Santa legends have been around for hundreds of years. He can't possibly be that old."

"Maybe he uses the Sleeping Phoenix Trance?" Sean said thoughtfully. "Da says everything's weird when you're in it. He only comes out on Christmas!"

That got a snort from Terri. "Don't be stupid," she said with the withering scorn of a big sister. "That's impossible."

"Thank you, Terri," Kamakura sighed. "Now would you please go to-"

"It's a legacy! There must be a Santa Clan or something," Terri continued, making Sean nod. "His son, and his son's son. Maybe there's a Santa Master."

Seeing that he wasn't going to win on that front, Kamakura tried a different tack. "What about getting around the world in one night? No ninja can do that."

For a moment, the twins looked crestfallen, and Kamakura felt simultaneously guilty at upsetting them and happy that maybe, just maybe, they'd go to sleep now. Alas, his hopes were dashed when Sean crossed his arms and glared at him. "If Santa has a clan, then he has apprentices. Like you're Da's apprentice, an' so is Jinx. An' apprentices have to do whatever he says, right?"

"Like deliver the presents," Terri contributed, looking satisfied. "And if it's a really, really big clan-"

"But, but, but," Kamakura managed, "The number of apprentices needed—it still couldn't get done fast enough-"

Another withering look, this time from both the twins. "The government," Terri said simply.

"The government?"

Sean rolled his eyes. "Da and Ma and Uncle Tommy go all around the world when the government asks them. Their planes can fly faster than sound and stuff."

"I can't believe I'm having this conversation," Kamakura murmured.

"Silly Kam," Terri said to Sean. "He probably thinks God isn't a ninja either."

"What?" Kamakura said.

"Well, duh," Sean said to the slightly confused apprentice. "Nobody ever sees him either, right? And he's super scary and he can kill you if he doesn't like you. And people are s'posed to be frightened of him, and do what he says or there's lots of blood everywhere."

" . . . go to sleep. Please."


End file.
